Listen to Lars Ulrich Read a Kids’ Christmas Story

It was written in 2008 by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler and follows the adventures of the titular character as he tries to find his way home in time for Christmas. You can listen to Ulrich read it below.

It capped off a successful year for Ulrich and his Metallica bandmates. In addition to a successful tour in support of their 2016 album, Hardwired ... to Self Destruct, they topped the annual rock sales chart and came third in the list of rock’s highest earners.

But manager Peter Mensch insisted the secret to their success was relatively simple. “We like each other and we respect each other," he said. "That’s the bottom line. My partner and I have a line: ‘You get the acts, as a manager, you deserve.’ There are acts that could be as smart as Metallica, or likable, but don’t respect what we have to say. We have a peculiar bunch of acts that we all like talking to, that we think are smart, they think we’re smart, we give them advice, they comment on our advice, we go back and forth and we come up with a plan.”

Metallica also released an expanded reissue of their groundbreaking 1986 album Master of Puppets. “There’s a spark, or spontaneity, or impulsiveness that happens when you’re in your twenties," Ulrich told Rolling Stonelast year.

"We wrote Master of Puppets in probably eight weeks over that summer. Nowadays it takes me eight weeks just to drive to the studio. It’s like, what the f--- did we do in the summer of ’85, where we could give birth to that from the first note to the last in eight weeks? Death Magnetic took us probably 18 months from when we started writing to when we started recording. On this current record, it probably took us nine months. How the f--- do you write a record like Master of Puppets in eight weeks?”